My anger sprang, not from a difference over policy, but from somewhere more primal. I wanted, as Walt Whitman might say, to sound my “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Whatever I thought about Jeb’s education plan or record as governor, he had touched a raw cultural nerve. His defense of his brother ignored and insulted the experiences of people like me, and he was proud of it.

In an instant, I became Trump’s biggest fan. I wanted him to go for the jugular. I wanted him to inquire whom, precisely, George W. Bush had kept safe. Was it the veterans lingering in a bureaucratic quagmire at the Department of Veterans Affairs or the victims of 9/11? Was it the enlistees from my block back home, who signed their lives on the dotted line while Jeb’s brother told the country to “go shopping” — something kids like me couldn’t afford to do?

Though Trump held his fire in the debate, he lit into George W. Bush on social media and in interviews afterwards. Other candidates defended the former president. They, too, failed to understand Trump’s appeal, how something so offensive to their political palate could be cathartic for millions of their own voters.

More:

I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd. But as a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in a struggling Rust Belt town, I understand why many adore him — why I, if only briefly, cheered him on. He tells America’s rich and powerful precisely what we wish we could tell them ourselves: that many of the things they view as accomplishments suck for people like us.

This is a key point. A key point:

This alienation separates Trump’s voters from the constituency of another firebrand insurgent, Ted Cruz. Cruz draws from married voters, evangelical Christians, the elderly and those who identify as “very conservative.” These folks might be angry about the political process, but their anger is ideological and their lives — filled with family and church — are fundamentally intact.

Trump’s voters, instead, wear an almost existential sense of betrayal. He relies on unmarried voters, individuals who rarely attend church services and those without much higher education. Many of these Trump voters have abandoned the faith of their forefathers and myriad social benefits that come with it. Their marriages have failed, and their families have fractured. The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs, but also a sense of purpose and community. Their kids (and themselves) might be more likely to die from a heroin overdose than any other group in the country.

Cruz’s voters dislike Jeb Bush because he has strayed from conservative orthodoxy. Trump’s voters loathe Jeb Bush because their lives are falling apart, and they blame people like him.

A number of social and religious conservatives went nuts yesterday when I posted something called “A Social Conservative Case For Trump,” even though I made it clear I wasn’t endorsing that case. (This morning I posted “A Social Conservative Case Against Trump,” which I also do not endorse.) It seems to me that for no small number of intellectual religious and social conservatives, the idea of voting for Trump is so repulsive and alien that they cannot imagine why anyone with any brains or moral scruples would do so.

This is not Trump’s problem. This is their problem. Do they even know the country they live in?

I was e-mailing with a liberal friend this morning about my Trump posts. He said he was shocked by the reaction, especially considering that I was clear that I was just working out a thought experiment. He wrote:

I’m totally with you on how out of touch these people are. The Trump-ites are my people, your people. When I go home to [deleted] I see so much despair, it just feels bleak. If you have any acquaintance with actual working class folks Trump should be easy to understand. It’s disturbing really that these “leaders” can’t get this. How can you read the studies of working class white men dying, killing themselves, stuck in addiction, and more and think, “Well, more free trade and tax credits will solve this!”

I would add to this, “… and think, ‘Well, more restrictions on abortion, attempts to overturn Obergefell, and religious liberty protections will solve this!'”

You readers know that I think religious liberty is the most important question facing America today. But I don’t know many people outside my relatively small circle of intellectual Christians who share my concern. It’s not even on their radar. Hey, it ought to be on their radar, because it’s going to affect them down the line more than they realize. Still, when you’re facing the kind of problems so many Americans who are not as well off and as secure as I am are facing, the kinds of things I worry about are an abstract threat.

I believe abortion ought to be further restricted. I believe Obergefell was wrongly decided, though I think attempts to overturn it are a waste of time. I am extremely interested in more religious liberty protections — so much so that the religious liberty issue will probably determine my vote this fall.

But.

Late the other night, we got a text from a woman we know. She is one of the working poor, white, and older. She is a good-hearted woman who works very hard. She came into work one day for a friend of mine. Her hand was swollen, and probably broken. She didn’t have the money to go to the doctor. My friend offered to pay for it, but the woman wouldn’t take it. She was too proud to take charity. She went to work. With a broken hand. My friend was moved to tears by her dignity, and begged her to go to the doctor, to not worry about the cost. It did no good.

When she texted the other night, she asked us for help moving. She lives in a poor town a parish (county) over from ours. She is in a bad marriage. I’m not sure which marriage this is; she has bad luck with men. We asked her if she was safe, did she need a place to stay? No answer. We were on tenterhooks. She has grown children, but they’re a mess, for Fishtown reasons. The next day, she got back in touch with us, and said everything was fine. I’m sure everything is not fine. She’s working with a broken hand, metaphorically speaking. This is her life.

I have no idea who this lady is supporting for president, or if she even votes. But I would bet you what’s in my wallet that to the extent that she is engaged at all in politics, she’s voting Trump. Because she would be voting her desperation. When you live in a small town like I do, you see folks like her, and you get to know them. It’s not hard to see how folks like that are the authors of their own misery in many cases, but that doesn’t make them any less human, or any less our neighbor (and that is true for people of all races). The thing that gets to me about this woman is that because of my own personal social network, I know how hard she works, and at a time in life when people her age are supposed to be able to slow down and take it easy. She will be working that hard until the day she drops, because she has nothing.

What does Jeb Bush have to offer her? Or Marco Rubio? Or Ted Cruz? Frankly, I don’t think that Donald Trump has much to offer her either (as J.D. Vance grasps), but he at least sees her, or appears to. That’s not nothing.

Another story. Since I’ve been back in Louisiana these past few years, I’ve done some travel through the state with my work, and on family business. I’ve had the occasion to drive through small towns all over the state that I had not seen since I was a kid in the 1970s and early 1980s. And it has shocked me what has happened to most of these places. As my liberal friend said about his part of the country (not the South), many of these towns are pretty damn bleak, in ways they were not 30,, 40 years ago. The people who could have gotten out, got out. The only ones left are those too proud or too broke to leave. But there they are.

The Davos elites of the Democrat and Republican parties didn’t get the teenage daughters of Fishtown pregnant, or didn’t get the Fishtown sons busted for possession or fired from his job for failing a drug test. Those elites didn’t make them stop going to church, or break up their marriage, and don’t tell them to sit on their butts playing video games all day instead of trying to hustle up a living. But those elites did, in many cases, have a lot to do with why they got laid off in their fifties and can’t find work, and why their adult children have to make do with crappy service industry jobs instead of manufacturing jobs that paid well, and on which a family could build a future.

Some of these folks have sons and brothers who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan shattered. A friend of mine is an Iraq vet, a rock-ribbed Republican who won a medal for his service, and he considers the Iraq War to have been a godawful waste. (I don’t know who his candidate is this year.) And Donald Trump is the only Republican Party candidate who has the sense and the courage to say, however crudely, that Iraq was a mistake. You think injured vets give a rat’s rear end whether or not Donald Trump is being mean to Jeb Bush’s family? Some do, no doubt, but I’d be surprised if many did.

On the church thing, J.D. Vance has it right. I live in the rural South, and around here, church is primarily a middle-class thing, at least among white people. People who think Trump’s voters care that he’s a bad Christian, or a Christian in anything but name only, are dreaming.

Remember J.D. Vance:

They, too, failed to understand Trump’s appeal, how something so offensive to their political palate could be cathartic for millions of their own voters.

Listen up, my fellow religious and social conservatives of the middle class. Trump may well be a false messiah; that’s an easy case to make. But we should try to remove the scales from our eyes and see the conditions that a lot of our fellow Americans live in, and ask why it is that the kind of candidate we have been voting for all these years, and have been pushing, have no credibility with these people. The Democrats tend to think of people like that as racists, and therefore beyond caring about. What’s our excuse?

Charles Featherstone once told me that when he was in ELCA (Lutheran) seminary, he often felt alienated from his fellow seminarians, because of his own hardscrabble, messy background. The others were so very, very progressive, and held on to harsh prejudices against white people who didn’t fit their neat, middle-class progressive mold. Charles was not ordained, in the end, and he’s pretty bitter about it. The other day he wrote this about his experiences, and in it, I saw a lot of myself, and middle-class Christians like me:

I think Lutherans are afraid of the world, of its rough edges, of dirt and grit, of strange smells, of babbling tongues they don’t understand, of crowded and uneven streets, and especially of dark alleys where life is lived in shadow. Lutheran good works generally involve cleaning and tidying and organizing and installing bright lights rather than meeting people where they are in chaotic darkness and then grabbing hold of them and not letting go. Because of this, I would, as an ELCA pastor, never be free to walk in that world and to witness to the love of God the way that I am truly called to do. The ELCA, for all its professed theological and social progressivism, is at its heart a very culturally conservative community — Lutherans believe deeply in certain social norms and expectations, in a right order to the world, and they harshly punish those who don’t adhere and do not conform. They may genuinely be a kind and gentle and tolerant people, but as a herd, they have the power to crush and destroy and marginalize just as easily as anyone. And they do. Far too easily and far too much.

ELCA Lutherans love, but almost always it’s love in box, love that is bounded, love that knows its limits, love that is well ordered and not allowed to overflow and make a mess. It is love that knows exactly who it is for, and why, and how. In the ELCA, love is only for certain people, who behave themselves, are good, and have the foresight to be born into the right, well-ordered, bourgeois circumstances. I said this in my book, and I will repeat it here — Lutherans may preach unearned grace, but their lived confession emphatically states, “If you truly need God’s grace, you clearly have not earned it.”

Note well, Charles Featherstone is a Lutheran complaining about his fellow Lutherans. I think his critique, though, strikes at the heart of a lot of middle-class American Christianity, including my own.

Does Featherstone’s harsh judgment of the liberal Lutherans of ELCA have anything to say to the rest of us Christians who (as I used to do) go nuts when confronted by the fact that lots of people like Donald Trump? Are we missing something important? Have we been far too narrow in our understanding of what it means to live in a Christian society, and of what it means to conserve Christian values? We have done a good job of bracketing off economic questions from social and moral ones in our politics, and now it has come back to bite us on the backside. If Trump, as Ross Douthat has suggested, may be a judgment on the Republican Party, people like you and me should also consider him a judgment on ourselves and what we have done, or failed to do, with our influence in the Republican Party and conservative movement.

A reader of this blog said that the Trump phenomenon reveals that there are two kids of social conservatives. I forget the language that he used, but I think that you have the ideological SoCons (those who operate out of a certain set of principles) and the nationalistic SoCons, who are more tribal and emotional. Cruz, and to some extent Rubio, appeal to the ideological SoCons; Trump, to the nationalists. Trump social conservatives probably don’t much care about abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty; the society they care about conserving is the one they see around them now, and see falling apart because of forces they (rightly and wrongly) see as beyond their control.

More Americans see themselves as belonging to the lower classes today than ever in recent times. In 2000 some 63 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, considered themselves middle class, while only 33 percent identified as working or lower class. In 2015, only 51 percent of Americans call themselves middle class while the percentage identifying with the lower classes rose to 48 percent.

The bulk of this population belongs to what some social scientists call the “precariat,” people who face diminished prospects of achieving middle-class status—a good job, homeownership, some decent retirement. The precariat is made up of a broad variety of jobs that include adjunct professors, freelancers, substitute teachers—essentially any worker without long-term job stability. According to one estimate, at least one-third of the U.S. workforce falls into this category. By 2020, a separate study estimates, more than 40 percent of Americans, or 60 million people, will be independent workers—freelancers, contractors, and temporary employees.

This constituency—notably the white majority—is angry, and with good cause. Between 1998 and 2013, white Americans have seen declines in both their incomes and their life expectancy, with large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse.They have, as one writer notes, “lost the narrative of their lives,” while being widely regarded as a dying species by a media that views them with contempt and ridicule.

In this sense, the flocking by stressed working-class whites to the Trump banner—the New York billionaire won 45 percent of New Hampshire Republican voters who did not attend college—represents a blowback from an increasingly stressed group that tends to attend church less and follow less conventional morality, which is perhaps one reason they prefer the looser Trump to the Bible-thumping Cruz, not to mention the failing Ben Carson.

Many Trump supporters are modern-day “Reagan Democrats.” Half of Trump’s supporters, according to a YouGov survey, stopped their education in high school or before. Trump’s message appeals to these voters in part by preserving Social Security and other entitlements. He appeals to populist rather than the usual GOP free-market sentiment, and decisively won all voters making under $50,000 a year. Tellingly, among Iowa Republican voters who called themselves “moderate or liberal,” Trump trounced Cruz, and duplicated the feat again in New Hampshire.

Conservative intellectuals dismiss Trump as both too radical and not conservative enough. He offends pundits in both parties by pushing things verboten in polite circles, such as trade with China, which has been responsible for the bulk of U.S. manufacturing losses. He also has embraced curbs on immigration, something that rankles the established leaders in both parties. “There’s a silent majority out there,” Trump says. “We’re tired of being pushed around, kicked around, and being led by stupid people.”

Sometimes the isolation is geographic as well as cultural. In major cities and their surrounding areas, those top-ranked zip codes in which the members of the new upper class live are surrounded by other top-ranked zip codes that form elite clusters consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, creating large bubbles within which life can go on without reference to anywhere outside the bubble. Even when the geographic isolation is not extreme, the differences in culture often are. The members of America’s new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don’t go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don’t share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class—or, better yet, of the new upper class. They take their vacations in different kinds of places than other Americans go and are often indifferent to the professional sports that are so popular among other Americans. Few have served in the military, and few of their children either.

Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn’t have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor’s monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase “all of the children are above average,” but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.

When people are making decisions that affect the lives of many other people, the cultural isolation that has grown up around America’s new upper class can be disastrous. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale law professors. It is a problem if Yale law professors, or producers of the nightly news, or CEOs of great corporations, or the President’s advisors, cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.

And it is a problem when Christians who run things, and live in nice neighborhoods, and are able to afford to send their kids to good schools, cannot empathize with the priorities of people who drive pick-ups with Trump stickers on the bumper. I’m seeing those around my town. I have yet to see a sticker for a single other Republican candidate. Not one.

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122 Responses to Trump: Fishtown’s Champion Against Belmont

Don’t have time to comment at length today, but I just wanted to thank you for writing this, Rod. All your pieces on the Trump phenomenon have been pretty great, but this one knocks it out of the park. Because I can’t resist tossing in my 2 cents, I’ll say that I think we’re about to see a political realignment akin to the Reagan Revolution, but this time based on issues of class, rather than culture. I take the point that the two are intertwined, but, as you noted, for people who are living paycheck to paycheck the big picture issues are inevitably going to be less urgent.

I don’t know what Lutheran denomination Charles Featherstone thinks he can be a pastor in… he has never struck me as a likely prospect for WELS or Missouri Synod. But, I can say from my own association with a WELS church that while the denomination may be full of people with the same attitude that “love is only for certain people, who behave themselves, are good, and have the foresight to be born into the right, well-ordered, bourgeois circumstances,” there are also churches that refused to move to the suburbs when neighborhoods “turned over” which now have thriving black congregations, and they also have one of the finest prison pastors I’ve ever met. I suspect even ELCA could do some of that. And I’m unclear what pristine Lutheran denomination Featherstone will find for himself.

I suspect that when the dust settles, we will find that Trump supporters tend more to be people on the edges of Belmont who identify with Fishtown, but are glad they don’t live there, rather than people in central Fishtown. Its a bit like how Richard Pryor audiences tended to be a mix of masochistic white who paid well to be verbally whipped for a couple of hours, and middle class blacks who could afford the tickets too, who reaffirmed their sense of blackness even though they are quite bourgeois, by watching Pryor whip the white folks. Similar pattern among country music fans… the ones who vote Republican are not living in shacks back up in the hills, they are reminiscing in the comfort of their well appointed suburban living room about how grandma and grandpa used to live in a picturesque shack — all the more picturesque for the distance of hundreds of miles and several decades from last contact.

A lot of this is the same pattern as William Henry Harrison’s log cabin… Harrison was the son and grandson of Virginia aristocrats.

KD, if you’re of that spirit, maybe treat the banksters like Castro treated Batista’s henchmen? After all the corruption was far more small-time in Havana. Or maybe not…

“I think what he’s saying is stuff that Rod and the readership here could at least kick around. Yeah, he supports abortion… but he’s better than the Republican candidates on just about every other issue. ”

Except immigration. Okay, I’ll give him credit that he did call out ‘progressives’ like Chait (or whoever it was) on their open borders fetish (‘That’s a right-wing, Koch policy’ say Bernie [from memory]). And the ‘progressive’ pajama boys got their undies in a wad about that.

But in practice Bernie is all about amnesty, and he even voted for the ‘Gang of Eight’ bill which would have brought in millions of additional ‘guest workers’ on top of our million + legal immigrants per year that we have now.

So no, Bernie doesn’t make a lot of sense on the key issue of our time for the white working and middle class.

Regarding Franklin Evans post, some things should be cleared up about the real Fishtown. As someone who lives 10 minutes outside of the city, I think his description is misleading. He is correct in saying that Fishtown has changed recently (although Coming Apart was written in 2012, i think most of Murray’s statistics were from ’08 or ’09, so it has been a fair number of years since his observations).

The neighborhood has been gentrified, not reformed and re-energized from within. The people who live there now have very much the “Swedish lifestyle” as Murray described in his book. You won’t find children or even many married couples in this neighborhood. My guess is most inhabitants are Bernie’s demographic target, not the Donald. These folks are not part of the cultural inheritance of a century long Irish-Catholic American experience; they are transplants who bounce from city to city, work at bookstores and cafes, and shack up from time to time.

I don’t mean to sound critical of this lifestyle here (although I would admit that i am) but just to point out that the “improvements” in Fishtown are far from being good signs for the grandchildren of the Reagan Democrats. It only moves them somewhere else, stripping away one of the few things they still had going for them: a familiar place that is their own.

“And it is a problem when Christians who run things, and live in nice neighborhoods, and are able to afford to send their kids to good schools, cannot empathize with the priorities of people who drive pick-ups with Trump stickers on the bumper.”

Especially were certain writers are perculating ideas about creating more bubbles for separatists from the mass of society to live in. You may condemn it as corrupt but don’t be surprised at how alienated they are. You’re right such voters really don’t care about religious liberty because they’re not really religious to care. It probably strikes them as odd that a baker, as a businessman, would tell any customer he refuses to service them on religious grounds. Business has no religion I’m sure they would say to themselves.

The class divide among evangelicals and how it neatly breaks down between Trump and Cruz is an interesting one. The “Religious Right” was middle to upper-middle class movement. Those mega-churches in San Antonio, Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte weren’t located in poor or working class neighborhoods, were they? It’s also not surprising given how it emerged from the more establishment Baptist Church or conservative branches of mainline denominations rather than the more traditional downscale Pentecostals. You should ask Doug Wead sometime when he worked for the Bush family some of he tricks he used to make sure the gospel of Pat Robertson was kept out of certain churches back in 1988.

Bottom line is though, the collapse of organized religious faith among the white working class goes hand-in-hand with economic collapse as well, especially outside of rural areas. A religious movement defined and limited by class is no movement.

The fallacy of the tech sector is adequately represented by the hipster “minimalists” who pride themselves on “only owning 100 things” and patting themselves on their backs for their “lack of greed.” Permit me if I guffaw. Such a “lack of objects” is only suitable if you are working in a sector that doesn’t require physical tools or raw materials, where all reference texts are electronic and accessible via the Net (which you have immediate access to), and where you can take public transportation or walk to work. In other words, a hipster working for Google in San Francisco.

Similarly, the US economy is not going to get its oomph from coders developing apps, especially not while China takes more and more of the capabilities of actually creating the chips and the computers the apps reside on out of US hands. We NEED manufacturing! I’d prefer we put tariffs on cheap junk from China and (forcibly) insist that people pay more money to pay for all the externalities of cheap Chinese manufacturing imposed on the US taxpayer.

M_Young says: “Seriously, cka2nd, don’t you think that unionization is a lot easier when there isn’t a reserve army of the unemployed just outside the borders, ready to let themselves in (illegal entrants), or to be brought in (the refugee industrial complex).”

Which is why many on the left might be willing to listen to proposals that traded limits on future immigration for improvements in workers’ rights.

M_Young says: “If the immigrants who were being used to bust wages were (mostly) blonde haired blue eyed Slavs, I have no doubt the Left would be up in arms against the policy of mass immigration.”

And you’d be wrong. Are left groups in the UK for closing the borders to Poles? Have leftists in America complained about the wave of Irish immigrants that came to the U.S. in the 1980’s (who did suffer harassment from the cops, I might add)? We might be willing to compromise on immigration but not if it includes the kind of racial discrimination that were built into the laws prior to 1965. That’s a non-starter.

Wow. Fantastic post, Rob. I live among and mingle with mostly affluent and mostly liberal people, and these people just cannot fathom why anyone would support Trump. They roll their eyes and ask, rhetorically, why?

I pretty much have to roll my eyes at that point. These people are doing OK, will continue to do OK unless civilization collapses, and their kids have a decent chance at doing OK too. These people are just out of touch as the Cruz/Rubio demographic is.

I spent most of my life working poor, only recently “made it” to middle class so to speak, and I know how close to the edge I am. I know what daily desperation feels like.

As for the Cruz/Rubio demographic described so well above, if they felt hunger and uncertainty on a daily basis and could see no end to it, only the likelihood of it getting worse, they would pull their heads out of their dream world too.

As you ask: Do these people even know what country they live in? I’ll only add that the hungry will not stay hungry forever.

Actually I will add one more thing. Working poor to me means:
1. You and your spouse (if you have one) each have multiple jobs with at least one of the full time. In our case up to seven at one point.
2. Your combined income barely meets your living expenses even if you live with cracks in the floor and vermin, and eat rice and beans from Costco
3. Medical expenses and car repairs are beyond of your income and you have to borrow money (at interest) to deal with them and
4. Even at that you have to decide which bills get paid and which bills do not; whether to fix the car, buy groceries or pay the doctor.

Imagine living like that and then hearing sanctimonious Congressmen talking about having to make hard choices as they cut whatever safety net you might be looking to. If this keeps up, it will be torches and pitchforks (only, this time and in this country, everybody has guns).

A good article, but it misses that fact that Trump voters range across all demographics, not just the less educated and divorced. The existential angst is all pervasive and is powering the wrecking ball against an out-of-touch establishment. Service sector wage slavery and mall shopping just doesn’t cut it anymore. Trump represents emancipation from powerful interests – corporatist, banking and oligarchic. The uncertainty of where Trump might take the country is overshadowed by the percieved certainty of this emancipation.

I am a firm believer in the rule of law and the sovereign power of the People to decide. So while I could see a jury trial on the basis that these financial activities could possibly violate fundamental human rights, so basic–like the crimes of the Nazis–that anyone could understand that the conduct was grossly immoral, I would not go the Castro route of taking the law into one’s own hands.

As I said, they should be given a full and fair opportunity to present their defense.

Yes, such debate that does exist in the UK does favor closing borders to EU immigrants but keeping open non-white immigration.

“We might be willing to compromise on immigration but not if it includes the kind of racial discrimination that were built into the laws prior to 1965. ”

The laws prior to 1965 were designed to maintain ethnic balance in an already developed country. Immigration should ‘look like America’, and there are plenty of reasons that is the case (for example, ethnic/racialist groups like ‘La Raza’ seeking to increase power through numbers despite the harm done to other groups and the country as a whole. Ethnically balancing immigration simply puts that off the table. And as you are pretty much a communist, I don’t really care that it is a non-starter.

I so appreciate this article. And some of the comments that show an ability to be sympathetic to the troubles and trouble spirit among America’s working people, even while hating Trump’s exploitation of that troubled spirit to exploit people’s fears.
My father was UAW and my mom Hotel and Rest. Workers, then Newspaper Guild. They each rose to comfort if not affluence, but never forgot their roots. Proud union roots.

People have forgotten or entirely disrespect what was lost when we lost a strong labor movement. When i was a kid in Detroit, every family had a wage earner in the house, and since it was Detroit, these were good, union wages. now it is a wasteland. literally. (and yes, i know how to use the word properly).
This discussion here, and the Trump phenomenon may help remind us of all this. I am struck by how Marxist some of us sound in this thread–class consciousness making a comeback in America? Overdue, i think. Not in the sense of knowing who your enemies are (although that can be very important at times of course), but in the sense of helping to provide a clear analysis of what is going on.
Yes there is class war–or at the very very least, class competition for resources and power–going on in America, and yes, so far at least, the working class has been losing.
Trump, therefore, should not surprise us. and i say that sooooo reluctantly.

Good article. I just have one little quibble, and it’s from the last quote, not any of the original parts, which seem utterly true to me. This, however, is not true:

They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor’s monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase “all of the children are above average,” but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.

Being upper-middle class doesn’t make you smart. There are plenty of below-average intellects born into wealthy families. I could name names, but that would be unkind, and is probably unnecessary anyway. Readers can supply their own examples. Just sayin’…

Very astute analysis, however. I wonder how many Trump voters will bail to Sanders’ camp, if he gets his party’s nomination and Trump doesn’t get his?

Really nice article and really hits it on the head. Anyone who wants to see what the policies of the elite on both sides has done to “flyover country”, what a bigoted statement, just has to get in a car and see some small towns. Downtowns boarded shut, folks living on whatever they can. But they are supposed to care about what the gated communities in the coastal cities care about.

One criticism is that from the exit polls trump has been winning ALL demographics. Poor, educated, uneducated, rich, conservative, moderate. All but most conservative. His candidacy has struck a nerve with all types of people. That the NR, WeeklyStandard and the GOPe so desperately want to bring him down, just says that they do not give a damn about those people. I just voted for Trump in Texas and very happy to do so. I have only voted for one democrat in my life, in 1976.

As I said, they should be given a full and fair opportunity to present their defense.

Fair enough, KD. Robert Jackson made a point at the Nurenburg tribunal that even after winning a major war, the victorious parties allowed that to those on trial for war crimes.

I note however that in the heady early years of the Cuban revolution, Castro made a point that “we ask the people first,” both in matters of policy and in trials of the Batista henchmen, who were indeed truly and righteously despised. The Soviet emissaries were rather baffled about this process.

Trump is providing a real and substantial service in recognizing and saying what is becoming increasingly obvious: (1) that unlimited free trade has outsourced our manufacturing base and jobs, and (2) that unlimited importation of immigrants undermines the employment opportunities of Americans. The people who have not yet been hurt by either factor will continue to utter the mantra that “globalization is good”, but as time goes on, and as the condition of Americans deteriorates further, more people–even “middle class” people–will come around to Trump’s point of view.

So, the polling that shows Trump won among evangelicals in South Carolina means he isn’t getting support from people who fit a definition of religious? Oh, the right definition of religious. Sorry.

Second, using terms like “tribal” and “emotional” don’t take you very far down the road you purport to be taking here. I’ve never seen anything more tribal that ordinary party politics, more irrationally dramatic than the teacup politics of the faculty lounge — nor more primal-scream emotional than the professional chattering classes when their self-centered musing hits reality’s pothole. You say something positive about Trump as a “thought experiment,” receive hysterical screeches of protest from your peers, then decide Trump supporters are the emotional ones? Lick that finger and stick it in the wind again.

Then you speak about people “unlike you” as if they’re extras in some barn house rape scene in a Faulkner novel. Or, pick your literary allusion: Faulkner is likely too middlebrow these days. The degree to which you sweepingly pathologize Trump supporters is neither accurate nor sympathetic. You clearly don’t know enough about the current politics to make these sorts of statements, and you’re clearly not involved enough in this election to have bothered to take a look at the real campaign as it manifests in the states. To use a term I rationally dislike, it’s a diverse movement.

You’re also missing some big basics regarding the polling. People whose lives are as disorganized as you describe and quote others describing don’t get involved in the political process at all. They don’t go to rallies: they don’t register to vote; they don’t spend their time being poked and prodded by their betters on obscure comment threads. They aren’t counted as likely voters. The devil’s in the details.

I personally know many of the people involved in both the TEA party in its various formulations and in the campaigns for several candidates in two states. Your description of the Trump supporters among them — and the people they are attracting — is not accurate. Pollsters aren’t confessors; divorced people are spread across all parties and candidates, and for just one example of the misuse of data here, when you look at the small cohorts of people currently backing the second tier candidates, based solely on this sort of data harvesting, you’re giving in to the temptation to imagine Trump supporters as universally and profoundly the opposite of the good people you see in the other camps. In reality, there are X% of divorced people in one group and X plus or minus a bit in the other. Stop trying to fit everything into some banal Matter With Kansas prototype. For the love of God, please just stop.

This is main stage concern trolling. Also stop pretending that just because someone feels immigration is a threat to their livelihood, they are toothless hillbillies churning meth in the third trailer they rented this month. Stop, even if you feel you’re conveying a vital drop of noblesse oblige by sensitively dilating upon their plight-as-you-see-it.

I would donate blood today if just one professional natterer would bother to know something about the real political process before projecting their emotions-slash-pet-theories on this race. Or, if you specifically wish to wear the mantle of the sensitive thinker of thoughtful religious beliefs, then stop reducing people to crude stereotypes based on — of all things — the pronouncements of political pollsters in a heated primary season. That one needs to suggest this is demoralizing but no longer unexpected.